Food Value Chain: Supporting Australia’s food value chains to transform their energy productivity

<p dir="ltr">The food value chain faces many challenges as it delivers essential and valued services to consumers while confronting climate change, increasing costs, disruptive innovation, extreme competition and many other issues. This project explored ways that energy productivity improvement could address these challenges directly by saving energy and indirectly by delivering multiple business benefits (including improvements in technical and business operations as well as practices which ultimately would reduce waste), especially through collaborative action across the value chain.</p><p dir="ltr">Through research and consultation with industry, existing activity, understanding and attitudes to energy productivity and potential for collaborative action across the food value chain were clarified. Options for models to mobilise collaborative action where developed and feedback sought. This led to recommendations for a consortium-based approach to build awareness and drive action.</p><p dir="ltr">The project applied three core elements:</p><p dir="ltr">•Focus on energy productivity, not just energy efficiency: energy productivity focuses on energy-relatedactions that add business value (in ways that may not immediately seem to be related to energy) foreach unit of energy consumed.</p><p dir="ltr">•Focus on value chains which consider inputs, supply chain participants and end-consumers, and theirshared interests and interdependencies.</p><p dir="ltr">•Application of a Systems Innovation Research model that reflects the complexities andinterrelationships between elements involved in driving change, highlighting interdependencies,exchanges and flows between value chain participants to provide a new means for optimising systemslevel benefits.</p>